Implement of torture? No, just the cutting edge of fashion

Ouch. Anyone fancy sitting down for dinner with Jemima Khan, while wearing their new Dolce & Gabbana steel belt? Oh, sorry, how hilarious; if you own one of these you're in fashion, so you may not eat dinner. Or lunch, or breakfast, or anything else. Still, the resounding scrape of metal against your protruding ribs ought to give you a little wince of satisfaction that you are, indeed, at the very height of vogue.

Obviously it is nice that we have moved on from belts-as-dresses, as modelled by professional crazy lady Jodie Marsh but, in a western world where women are meant to have some sort of say about their daily lives, the level of torture we like to inflict on ourselves seems to go up every year. Let's see: there's the getting-down-to-size-zero, a Herculean achievement involving eating only grapes (according to one former model). Then there's the "slash open my torso with a knife and fill my bosoms with plastic", as practised by practically every idiot celebrity. And there's "watch me walk in six-inch heels, until I'm 40 and have to be confined to a bath chair".

Forget foot-binding and Thai hill tribeswomen elongating their necks, our current cultural standards put everything in the shade. And more often than not, it's women encouraging women to do it. Men, frankly, aren't that turned on by your being encased by padlocked steel unless they've been harbouring secret Fritz Lang fantasies, in which case they are probably too old for you.

Still, at least at the (literal) cutting edge of fashion you are buying quality. Or are you? Emma Thompson had to help Khan out at a posh do this week when the thing came undone - tcch, you spend a gajillion billion pounds on an insane iron-maiden belt, and the welding doesn't even hang together.

So, it's an incredibly expensive torture device that stops you sitting, eating or breathing, it makes you look mad and it doesn't actually work very well. I give it three days before we see Geri Halliwell in one.